Blossoms in the Wind: Human Legacies of the Kamikaze (14 page)

The twentieth and most of the twenty-first we
re spent piecing together whatever could be salvaged from the wrecks and overseeing the repair of the damaged aircraft. On the afternoon of the twenty-first, Captain Takaishi was summoned back to 4AF HQ for an urgent meeting with Lieutenant General Tominaga. The other pilots had a pretty good idea of what this meant. The loss of the planes obviously derailed any plans to muster the Sekichō Unit in toto for a group mission in the immediate future, but repair work around the clock had gotten four of the machines back online, ready to go. Things were beginning to accelerate now, and after all the hoopla in Manila the day before, folks at the top would want to hear of big things from the Sekichō Unit while the media buzz was still strong. The army brass could not very well just sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for new planes and whining about equipment problems while the navy grabbed all the headlines coming out of the Philippines, electrifying the home front with accounts of stirring self-sacrifice. The army was overdue for some favorable press.

That evening, Takaishi arrived back at Pollack long-faced and notably apprehensive. He called a meeting with his pilots in the billets, where he recounted details of the afternoon’s meeting with the general. The young captain made the astonishing revelation that he had actually petitioned Tominaga for permission
to let the Sekichō Unit contribute to the war effort in the skip-bombing role its pilots had been trained for instead of squandering them on one-time-only tokkō missions. The general – apparently still on a roll after the favorable press conference of the nineteenth – took offense at this request, denying it with the retort that it would not reflect well on the “spirit of tokkō” in the eyes of the service or the Japanese public for the Sekichō Unit’s mission to be changed now that the story had been carried in the press back home. Takaishi told everyone that there was nothing to do except swallow their pride and follow their orders like good soldiers. He vowed to set the example by piloting the first plane into the target when they finally flew their mission.

In the meantime, there were flight orders for the next morning; Takaishi would lead Lieutenants Okagami, Ichihara and Yoshitake in the squadron’s four functioning aircraft and head for Bacolod Airfield on Negros Island for forward deployment. Negros was on the western edge of the Leyte main area of operations, so attack orders could come at any time. XO Hosoda would bring the rest of the squadron down to Bacolod as soon as the replacement planes arrived, but there was no guarantee that this would be soo
n enough for Sekichō Unit to all fly out together when X-Day finally arrived. The possibility of the unit being parceled out piecemeal on three- and four-plane tokkō missions was a heartbreaking scenario for the pilots, but as Takaishi reminded them, complaining about this was not a luxury afforded them by present circumstances.

About twenty minutes out of Pollock the next morning, the flight ran into bad weather and radioed for an emergency landing at a minor army airstrip near the town of Lipa in the southern suburbs of Manila. Yoshitake had been feeling a bit under the weather ever since waking up that morning. Coming into the landing pattern, his condition worsened so quickly and severely that he could barely move his arms or legs anymore. His head spun and he felt nauseated, but somehow, he brought the
Ki-
51 down safely. By the time his wheels rolled to a stop on the runway grass, he was so weak and disoriented that he could not even unbuckle his seat straps. A ground crew helped him from his cockpit and took him to the base hospital shack, where he was diagnosed with dengue fever. If the illness had kicked in even a few minutes earlier, while the flight was still in the air, he probably would have crashed his plane upon attempting to land. As things stood, he was not in a condition to attempt very much of anything right now. He went flat on his back for the next few days, and watched from a cot in the Lipa hospital shack when Takaishi and the others took off for Bacolod without him after the weather cleared on the 25th.

Yoshitake was on his feet by the next day, and hitched a flight back to Pollock, where he was surprised to find Takaishi, Okagami and Ichihara back with the others. Army Air Command in the Leyte area had determined that the army’s 500kg b
ombs, which had been designed for maximum anti-personnel fragmentation in land-based tactical situations, were not suited for anti-shipping use. From now on, all army tokkō aircraft would be armed with navy bombs designed specifically to explode after penetrating ship decks. The only problem though, was that the army planes’ bomb racks were not compatible with navy ordnance – not only anti-shipping bombs, but
any
navy ordinance – even general purpose high-explosive fragmentation weapons. This was a vivid illustration not only of the lack of standardization in Japan’s war machine but also symbolic of the simmering eighty-year-old army/navy rivalry that had been such a hindrance to Japan’s military efforts in every conflict it had fought since the Meiji Era. The significance of these ordnance technicalities for the Sekichō Unit, in practical terms, was that there would be more down time until the Pollock mechanics could jury rig release mechanisms capable of handling the navy bombs.

Enough replacement
Ki-
51s arrived from Japan over the next few days for Takaishi to have eight planes on the flight line for a rousing send-off to Bacolod on the morning of December 3. Yoshitake rode in the backseat of Second Lieutenant Takao Ōi’s aircraft, and was dropped off at Lipa to pick up his plane while the others flew on to their destination. Yoshitake was happy to find his
Ki-
51 still in one piece, but unfortunately, something had happened during the past ten days to throw the engine out of whack. Ōi flew on alone to Bacolod while Yoshitake waited at Lipa, once again dependent on the kindness of strangers to get his engine up and running.

Lipa mechanics spent the morning and early afternoon of December 4
running checks on the new Mitsubishi Ha-26-II engine they had installed in Yoshitake’s plane in lieu of doing a time-consuming and possibly useless repair job on the original powerplant. With the new engine given as good a check as time allowed, the plane’s fuel tanks were topped off and a 500kg naval bomb was slung under its belly for the 430-kilometer run down to Bacolod. Maintaining a decent cruising speed and barring more mechanical failure, the flight would take about ninety minutes. Aside from one slight heading adjustment over Mindoro Island to keep him over land a little longer, navigation would be a matter of maintaining heading and basically flying in a straight line.

Not that the flight would be a milk run – Yoshitake would be flying the whole ninety minutes unescorted and alone in a plane that would not last sixty seconds in a dogfight. Moreover, most of the trip would be made at dusk, with the last leg well after nightfall. Making matters worse, it looked like there was some weather moving in from the southwest, so there would be no room for navigation errors or distractions on the way down.

Iffy engine, lousy visibility and lack of escort notwithstanding, there was no way he was going to miss this flight. It was imperative that he join up with the other Sekichō Unit members by evening. By now they were already set up in their forward combat staging area, so there was a distinct possibility that they would be going into action the following morning. He hadn’t come this far to meet death with strangers – and certainly not alone. The Lipa people had understood and respected that and gone out of their way to accommodate his wishes. He was thankful for their help, especially for the efforts of the mechanics, who had worked through the night without sleep to get his new engine up and running so he could make it to Bacolod in time to sortie with his comrades.  

After a modest send-off by the Lipa base commander and some staff officers, Yoshitake received takeoff clearance at around 1600. He made the customary counterclockwise circuit of the field to gain some altitude and gave a final wing-waggle to his hosts as he picked up a south-southeast heading, flying away into a cobalt blue late afternoon sky with the sun low over the tree line on the west end of the field. In a few minutes he was out over water, alone, and feeling every second of it.

About fifteen minutes into the flight, just off the north coast of Mindoro, Yoshitake caught metallic glints sparkling in the upper right corner of his peripheral vision. He squinted for a better look and swallowed hard when he made out the distinctive twin tail booms of four American P-38 Lightnings, their unpainted aluminum finish a brash challenge to all comers, all silver and molten gold in the late afternoon sun. Flying overhead in the opposite direction in a loose finger-four tactical formation, the land-based American army fighters had at least a thousand meter altitude advantage. If they wanted him, they had him cold. Any one of the cannon-armed Lightnings could split-S, come up from behind with overwhelming speed, and chew the
Ki-
51 to pieces in a single pass. He wrestled with these unpleasant thoughts for an eternal minute or two of white-knuckled nerves until the P-38s faded away in the upper rear Plexiglas panels of his canopy.

He gave a long sigh of relief and wondered who or what – other than the amulet doll hanging from his canopy release bar – was to thank for sparing his life. Perhaps the Americans had not noticed his army green camouflaged plane flying below their formation. Maybe they had merely passed him over as small fry not worth breaking up the mission timetable for. But in either case, he was damned lucky to fly away from the encounter with nothing worse than a good war story, a slightly damp flight suit and a mild case of the shakes to show for it.

The
Ki-
51 soldiered on for a mercifully uneventful three-hundred-kilometer leg before hitting heavy cloud cover over Panay Island just as nightfall set in. Yoshitake had plenty of experience flying in low-visibility conditions, so it was no big deal at first, but things went south fast. Within a few minutes, a misty rain had cut visibility to zero.

Shortly after entering basic flight training, Yoshitake had learned about vertigo, that most lethal of mind games that can afflict a pilot on the stick. He was taught that low visibility conditions encountered while flying at night and/or socked in by weather, especially when compounded by turbulence, were most likely to bring on an “episode.” Under these conditions, even the most experienced flyer was susceptible to vertigo – defined here as the basic and normally inalienable ability to distinguish up from down. If this happened and you panicked, it was only a matter of time – and not much time, at that – before your plane rolled, went into a dive, and finally augered into the ground.

These were not reassuring thoughts to be having just now, and Yoshitake groped for happier ones to hold back a kernel of panic he felt forming in his stomach – still manageable but there nonetheless – all too aware that if he lost control, he’d be lizard food before he knew what hit him, spread with the wreckage of his plane over a few hundred meters of triple-canopy jungle.

He basically had three options here: he could maintain present altitude and just try to fly straight and level. This would probably be the safest bet, but the chance of getting a little visibility warranted weighing alternatives. Another option would be to try to climb up and over the clouds – but there was no telling what all of this rainwater was doing to the engine, which was already getting stingy on rpm’s and was grossly overworked by having to pull the damned naval bomb around all afternoon. A stall right now would be fatal, so a power-draining climb was out. The engine would have to be nursed all the way to Negros.

The last option would be to drop altitude and try to get under the cloud cover. This would not help with the rain, obviously, but at least it would give him an outside chance of being able to see something on the ground – perhaps lights from a town – that he could use to guide him on his way. Then again, of course, there were dangers involved with this option, too. As he had no idea how far down cloud cover went, so there was no knowing whether or not there would be an unwelcome piece of vertical terra firma – namely, a mountainside – waiting to greet him as soon as he managed to poke out of this pea soup. He could, of course, check the charts for mountain heights, then set a reasonable lower altitude limit with enough clearance to fly over anything that might be in the way, but he really did not want to lose altitude right now. He was still too far away from Negros to go hill-slaloming in an overloaded
Ki-
51 with an undependable engine.

He finally opted, with some misgivings, to keep flying straight as long as he could, relying on his aviator’s watch, airspeed indicator, compass, and map to tell him when he would be over water and it would be safe to try to duck under and out of the cloud cover. All that was left to do now was to keep his fear in check, rely on his instruments, and pray like hell that his fuel would hold out. Under perfect conditions, the
Ki-
51 had a range of about a thousand kilometers – twice the distance of tonight’s flight – but there was no telling what the weather, headwinds, and, of course, the abnormal bomb loadout were doing to the engine’s fuel consumption rate. 

Yoshitake checked his heading, watch, and map once more before gently pushing forward on the stick.

As the plane dropped out of the fog, perfectly flat slate gray horizons fading to black appeared in all directions. He was over water, headed south-southeast. Negros Island would be coming up in a few minutes. The sooner the better, because the weather had taken a decided turn for the worse. The rain was now a torrential downpour that was battering the plane like hail on a tin roof, raindrop splashes turning the canopy into a shroud of colorless kaleidoscope glass. Visibility was nearly obliterated, almost as bad as before. The overloaded plane’s center of gravity was all over the place, yawing the airframe this way and that. Trying to fly through this junk was like being blindfolded with surgical gauze and shooting whitewater rapids on a grand piano.